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Earlier this year, We the Individuals published a piece following Bernie Sanders’ announcement to run for president. Since that time, Bernie Sanders has made a number of other proposals to “fix” this country which have been echoed by his supporters. Certain issues he has sworn to deal with are healthcare, minimum wage, and college — it is the latter which we will be addressing. If you are a student in college, you may be aware that the costs of college have continued to rise. Because of this, students take on enormous debt which for many individuals takes years to pay off...

There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved. -Ludwig von Mises The Austrian Business Cycle Theory (ABCT) elaborates on booms and busts that are happening in the economy. As you might have guessed if you don't know already, this series of booms and busts is known as the business cycle. ABCT was originally developed by Ludwig von Mises in...

A public and subsidized school system is guaranteed to fail, and will become worse as time goes on. The only way to reliably provide a robust and useful education to individuals is through the free market.

As the election season draws closer, more and more candidates have thrown their hats into the ring. It seems everyone and their dog is now running for president. Up until the end of last month, the forecast looked as if it was to be, well, the entire Republican party versus Hillary Clinton. That is until late April of this year when the senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy. And if that isn't bad enough, Bernie Sanders brought a couple of economic fallacies with him which have since been regurgitated by his supporters and many others on the Left. Prior...

Methodological individualism is the method of social study which realizes that groups and collectives have no existence outside of the actions of specific individuals. An understanding of collectives must begin with an understanding of individual action. Yet this does not deny the existence or significance of groups and collectives. As Mises argues, "Nobody ventures to deny that nations, states, municipalities, parties, religious communities, are real factors determining the course of human events. Methodological individualism, far from contesting the significance of such collective wholes, considers it as one of its main tasks to describe and to analyze their becoming and their disappearing,...

Without economics, good intentions rarely translate into good results. Most people don't even know they're making or dealing with economic arguments. You don't start with a goal and try to build economic models to produce the desired results, resisting any understanding that fails to conform to your ideological preferences. No. Our sole pursuit is an understanding of the market, and our political advocacy comes from the results of this analysis, not the other way around.

If you're like me, you may to an extent be a nerd when it comes to economics. Like many who have studied economics, I am the type of guy who will watch a movie like Cast Away or Mad Max and start doing an analysis of the economic systems the characters use or how they trade and survive. Occasionally I will watch a movie like Godzilla or The Avengers and when destruction happens, I am the kind of person who will call the antagonists Keynesians. So you could say I like economics. Some people don't typically care for economics, for...

When the words "labor union" are spoken, many libertarians will rightfully cringe. The student of economics understands the economic complications that unions create and the student of politics recognizes the influence on government that unions exert. In this regard, the free market libertarian approach appears to be clearly anti-union. At least until we begin to explore some of the nuances of the debate. In the debate on unions, the first distinction to make is between “forced association” and “free association.” Because unions make up some of the largest political contributors, the overwhelming influence of unions - both economically and politically...

I am going to start this article by issuing a formal, public apology. Some time ago I made the claim that the person who is the subject of this article is not a libertarian due to the fact that she cared more for being a libertarian "celebrity" as opposed to libertarian principles. It was my error to assume so. Over the last year or so there has been an individual who has been in the spotlight and has also caused shockwaves amongst various libertarian circles and who goes by the name Cathy Reisenwitz. If you have been around in the...

In a previous article I described a legal system that doesn’t commit aggression and prohibits aggression. You may have noticed it doesn't rely on armed agents providing ex ante defensive services — rather it relies on a) providing restitution to victims if aggressions do occur, and b) doing so at the perpetrator's expense when possible, such that aggression becomes very risky and expensive. Since law was one of the last things I fought mentally, myself, before being won over, and because it was a basic layout, undoubtedly there will be those with concerns and "what if" questions, which I aim...

Several systems have been postulated and/or implemented, historically, for the private provision of legal services and the enforcement of legal decisions. I'm going to describe my favorite theoretical system (which resembles Xeer law). In a following article I will be addressing some concerns that are raised with this type of system, yet for now I will give a basic layout. The central service in the system is indemnification against crime — harm to the customer or his property. Typically, they're called "dispute resolution organizations," or DROs, as that describes their main purpose, but they work very much like insurance companies,...

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a ‘dismal science.’ But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance." ~ Murray Rothbard Chances are that if you are a libertarian and have been in a discussion with, say, a progressive regarding economics or an economic proposal, then your position is dismissed in light of your opponents’ ideological sensibilities. For instance, if you are arguing against minimum wage then your counterpart...

If you were to mention the word "redistribution" to a run-of-the-mill libertarian, it usually brings up red flags, and rightfully so. Government is people spending other people's money. Since taxes are not the product of government labor and voluntary trade, the livelihoods of those who decide how it gets spent (government officials) aren't at risk when it's spent inefficiently or wastefully. Market forces, such as profit and loss, are not present to even a modicum of the same extent as they are with private money. Welfare programs are therefore a misallocation of resources. You're stripping resources from those that create...

In a conversation with a minarchist your definition of terms may not matter, isn't likely to be controversial, doesn't need to be precise, isn't going to cause problems. You can either bicker about misconceptions or get precise about your definitions, about what you're opposed to and what you're not.

You don't hire people to run a country. The problem isn't that the people in charge are unintelligent or corrupt — the problem is that there are people in charge. If there must be people in charge, it would be nice if they had a correct understanding of, say, economics, but if that were the case they'd just sit around all day “being in charge," and there wouldn't be anything to pay them for.

Most people have most of the same goals in terms of economic policy – we want fewer poor people, we want the remaining poor to be better off, and so on. We only disagree about means, and that’s what economics is for.

If you’ve read any of this site’s work, you may know that it's rather critical of aspects of the libertarian left - for instance, their stance on unions, "thick libertarianism", or the term "capitalism". Well, this topic is no exception. Of the numerous discussions that have been circulating through the "libertarian movement” that this site has addressed, the one concerning "privilege" is one that tends to stand out to the most. Whether it is coming from Cathy Reisenwitz, Julie Borowski (who criticizes it), the Center for a Stateless Society, or others, it is a difficult discussion to not come across....

Anarcho-Capitalists aren’t really anarchists. I know I really shouldn’t let these school-yard arguments get under my skin, but when they distract from the actual debate of ideas (and this certainly does), it bothers me. So in my frustration, allow me my attempt - futile though it may be - at laying this silly criticism to rest. I will gladly make certain concessions to the arguments of left-anarchists regarding their history, but I will not be conceding their claim to the term.